Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Spring turkey kill up 7 percent
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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The Department of Game and Inland Fisheries has finished compiling data from the 2008 spring turkey season, and the results aren't a big surprise.
The total kill was 15,037, up 7 percent from 2007 and up ever so slightly over the five-year average of 15,003.
Gary Norman, the biologist who oversees Virginia's Small Game Program, said he was encouraged by the number.
"Given the poor recruitment we'd had the past couple of years, I was afraid it would be stable or maybe even down," Norman said.
Recruitment is a key because it shapes the population for coming seasons. A good hatch typically accounts for good hunting two and three years later as those gobblers reach maturity.
Adult gobblers at least 2 years old accounted for 89 percent of the kill this past spring. Juvenile males made up almost the entirety of the balance, with the exception of the 0.2 percent of the kill consisting of bearded hens.
Although age structure and past hatch successes and failures are so important, weather can have a huge impact on the total tally.
"We have a lot of harvest on weekends," Norman said. "If you get a perfect storm of bad weather on weekends, especially early in the season, it can have a huge impact."
Weekend weather wasn't always ideal during the 2008 season, but it wasn't terrible like some early-season days in the 2007 season.
Norman said he suspected the tough hunting in 2007 -- when the kill was 14,090 -- might have actually helped the hunting this past spring.
"We might have had some birds carry over because of the bad weather in 2007," he said.
Perennial leader Bedford was the state's top county in which to hunt turkeys, with a total of 525 birds.
Although the figure represented a good jump from the 2007 kill of 462, it was still far off the county's record of 745 set in 2002.
Kill totals don't tell the whole story because counties vary so much in size and in area to hunt. Bedford also ranked among the state's best in terms of the number of gobblers killed per square acre of forest land, at a rate of 1.17.
Pittsylvania displaced Franklin from the No. 2 slot, with a kill of 501, a jump of 34 percent. The kill in Franklin was 446, about 10 percent over its 2007 kill.
Other top counties in the region included Botetourt with 311 birds and Wythe with 262.
While Norman was generally encouraged by the statewide totals, he did voice a couple of concerns.
The kill remains small in some counties in the Northern Piedmont. The kill in Green County, for example, was just 11 birds -- for a rate of 0.11 per square mile of forest land.
Norman said he had been wondering if development and land fragmentation was to blame, but he has determined that isn't the case.
Some hunters have blamed predators, but Norman said predators are a statewide issue.
"We don't really know what's going on," he said.
Another concern is participation in the special youth day, the Saturday prior to the general opener.
The youth season produced 238 birds this year, only three more than the 2007 youth day, when young hunters and their mentors had to battle snow and sub-freezing temperatures.
"The weather was better this year," Norman said. "It should have gone up more."
Norman also said he wishes total numbers could be made available to the public earlier, rather than more than two months after the season ends.
"It's almost anti-climatic when you get the numbers in August," he said. "Everybody's moved on."
The delay is a result of agency's game checking system.
Hunters may check in their gobblers by phone or Internet, or they may take them to one of the state's roughly 1,000 authorized game checking to personally check the birds.
Processing electronic checks is a lot cheaper for the DGIF than processing manual check cards. Among other reasons, the agency doesn't have to send personnel out to check stations to retrieve check-card books or manually compile information from 8,000-plus pieces of paper.
For hunters, the five-minute phone or Internet checking process saves them time and gas money.
Even so, only 47 percent of successful gobbler hunters checked their birds electronically this spring.
Apparently many turkey hunters still like the tradition of driving up to a check station and personally showing off a gobbler to anyone who cares to check it out.
